Stanford University Press
Rawls and Habermas
About this book
This book offers a comprehensive evaluation of the two preeminent post-WWII political philosophers, John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Both men question how we can be free and autonomous under coercive law and how we might collectively use our reason to justify exercises of political power. In pluralistic modern democracies, citizens cannot be expected to agree about social norms on the basis of common allegiance to comprehensive metaphysical or religious doctrines concerning persons or society, and both philosophers thus engage fundamental questions about how a normatively binding framework for the public use of reason might be possible and justifiable. Hedrick explores the notion of reasonableness underwriting Rawls's political liberalism and the theory of communicative rationality that sustains Habermas's procedural conception of the democratic constitutional state. His book challenges the Rawlsianism prevalent in the Anglo-American world today while defending Habermas's often poorly understood theory as a superior alternative.
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Frontmatter
i -
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Acknowledgments
v -
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Contents
vii -
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Abbreviations
ix -
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Introduction
1 -
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1. Freestanding Political Philosophy and the Descriptivist Critique of Rawls
17 -
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2. The Rawlsian Apparatus of Justification
34 -
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3. Rawls between Metaphysics and Proceduralism
61 -
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4. Procedure and Substance, Construction and Reconstruction
81 -
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5. Discourse Theory and the Constitutional Democratic State
103 -
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6. Proceduralism and Functionalism in Habermas’s Theory of Law and Democracy
125 -
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7. Rawls and the Critique of Constitutional Contractarianism
149 -
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8. Habermasian Constitutional Theory
166 -
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9. Conclusion: Idealizations and Power
184 -
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Notes
197 -
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Works Cited
225 -
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Index
237